When
Elizabeth Vander Lei and bonnie lenore kyburz published Negotiating
Religious Faith in the Composition Classroom
in 2005, the scholarly discussion about religiously committed
students in composition studies arguably was reaching its
adolescence. That conversation dates back to 1989 when Chris Anderson
published The Description of an Embarrassment: When Students Write
about Religion in ADE Bulletin. From there,
it developed with contributions from scholars like Ronda Leathers
Dively, Amy Goodburn, Priscilla Perkins, and Lizabeth A. Rand, among
others—contributions that generally explored the tumultuous
relationship between religion and composition teaching. Many of these
articles appeared in our major journals, but Negotiating
Religious Faith
underscored the arrival of this conversation as a conversation, one
wherein multiple scholars were responding to previous scholars and
approaching the subject from a variety of theoretical lenses and
perspectives. That same year, the Rhetoric and Christian Traditions
Special Interest Group (now a CCCC Standing Group) sponsored a
conference at DePaul University where over one hundred scholars in
rhetoric and composition met for dialogue about the intersections of
rhetoric, composition, and Christianity. With an edited collection
and a conference to boot, 2005 thus marked something of a watershed
year. Not only was the discussion about religion in composition
legitimate scholarly territory, but it was one with energy, interest,
and a host of questions ripe for exploration.

Fast
forward a decade and the publication of Renovating
Rhetoric in Christian Tradition
signals that the conversation has matured and expanded. While
chapters by Perkins, Vander Lei, and Daniell directly explore the
intersections of religion and composition teaching, the rest of the
collection considers more expansive intersections of rhetoric and
Christian tradition, including the rhetorical and literate practices
of nineteenth-century Mormon women (Gere), the resistance rhetoric of
Seventh-Day Adventism (Rand), various strategies whereby women
rhetors achieve rhetorical agency in patriarchal Christian traditions
(Tolar Burton; Adams-Roberts, Collings Eves, and Rohan; Seat), the
sources of potential conflicts between rhetoric and Christian
tradition (Amorose), and the Jewish roots of Paul’s argumentative
strategies (Hertzberg). RRCT
offers much for compositionists who want to work productively with
religious students and explore the complex relationship between
rhetoric and religion, and it does so largely through its twin themes
of renovation and transfer. While renovation represents the book’s
central term, transfer is no less important, especially for
compositionists seeking to read RRCT
as a text that can inform composition pedagogy.

Arguably,
Vander Lei offers the most direct definition of renovation in her
chapter when she writes than an “attitude of renovation” entails
“valuing what is present and seeking to improve it, over deciding
to demolish it and build anew” (90). This definition corresponds to
the verbs Vander Lei uses in the volume’s introduction to name the
processes associated with renovation, verbs like reshaping,
adapting, creating, blending, refurbishing,
altering, and refining.
Such verbs point readers toward the dynamism of renovation and toward
the book’s central argument: rhetoric and Christian tradition exist
in a complex but often mutually-informing relationship, one wherein
rhetors who speak from within Christian tradition work both through
and against resources provided from that tradition in order to remake
themselves, their communities, and even Christian tradition itself.
Renovating rhetoric in Christian tradition thus means coming to terms
with the complexity of Christian tradition and with the ingenuity of
rhetors who speak from within it, often in ways that uphold its
virtues while pushing back against its oppressive elements.

While
transfer doesn’t show up as frequently as renovation does (each
chapter connects directly to the theme of renovation), it is no less
pervasive of a concept. Compositionists know that transfer highlights
the permeability of boundaries—rhetors carry with them knowledge,
skills, and assumptions from one course, context, or community to
another, sometimes beneficially, sometimes detrimentally. A similar
notion of permeability rests at the center of RRCT.
For example, Hertzberg demonstrates how Paul’s knowledge of Jewish
argumentative structures emerges in his Christian writings, while
Gere explores the fluid boundaries between Mormon women’s
private/religious lives and public/civic lives, a fluidity that
Adams-Roberts and her collaborators echo. Moreover, the three overtly
pedagogical chapters by Perkins, Vander Lei, and Daniell assume two
forms of transfer: students will transfer religious ways of knowing
into their academic work, and instructors can transfer into
rhetorical education ideas drawn from Christian tradition that can
help such students think and write rhetorically.

Perkins,
for instance, shares her experiences working with two students who
transfer their faith into academic practice: Tina, a fundamentalist
Christian student, and Sara, a more rhetorically flexible evangelical
Christian. Perkins appeals to the work of Catholic writer Bernard
Lonergan to advocate a pedagogy of self-appropriation that stresses
“habits of reflection” (75). Through such a pedagogy, students
and teachers alike are encouraged to “reappraise their earlier
thoughts, words, and interactions in ways that enhance the best
practices of process pedagogy” (75). Pedagogies informed by
Lonerganian self-reflection can help students come to terms with who
they are—with the selves, beliefs, and identities they bring to
academic contexts—in ways that can lead to more ethical
argumentation (76). Perkins ultimately is modest in the kind of
transformation she sees such a pedagogy as initiating: she shows, for
instance, that while Sara achieves Lonerganian self-reflection in
bringing her faith to bear on her academic writing, Tina fails to
achieve such a subjectivity. But the overarching argument is that
transferring Lonergan’s habits of reflection into academic practice
can renovate the writing of at least some students.

Vander
Lei and Daniell similarly argue that transferring in perspectives
from Christian tradition can help compositionists work productively
with religiously committed students. Vander Lei does so by appealing
to the work of Christian theologians Stanley Hauerwas and Miroslav
Volf in order to “renovate our writing pedagogy so that we can
engage people whose words and ideas we find disagreeable” and
thereby avoid “intellectual violence” (94, 91). In particular,
Vander Lei explores Hauerwas’s narrative theology and Volf’s
notion of hospitality as frames that can help compositionists welcome
students we may perceive as ideological others. In her chapter,
Daniell considers how compositionists can help students wrestle
productively with the epistemological and hermeneutical gaps that can
exist between ways of reading associated with the academy and with
faith communities. Transfer rests at the heart of Daniell’s
discussion. Early in her chapter, she writes, “The young adults who
come into our classrooms are moving into critical thinking and are
being confronted with ideas that are new to them and narratives that
run counter to the ones they learned in their home communities”
(105). Questions of truth arise because students unwittingly transfer
into the writing classroom assumptions about reading, knowledge, and
truth that they learned in church or at home. Educational theorists
might call this negative transfer because the epistemologies tend to
clash, but a better term might be unwilling transfer—students can’t
help but realize at some point that their received ways of knowing
bump up against what they are being taught. Daniell’s thoughtful
approach to such conflict—namely anticipating such conflicts and
helping students see how Christian tradition has wrestled with them
for centuries—can go a long way in helping students renovate their
approaches to reading and knowing productively.

Much
of the contribution that RRCT
makes to composition studies, then, is that renovation complicates
our notions of transfer. It underscores what we as a field have been
talking about for some time now: that transfer is no simple process
but rather a set of processes whereby knowledge, assumptions, and
beliefs become transformed, adapted, and reconfigured as they are
recontextualized. Vander Lei puts it this way: “As rhetors in
Christian tradition take up rhetorical resources and fit them to
argumentative need, rhetors inevitably alter both the resources and
themselves” (xiii). Vander Lei nods to scholarship on transfer when
she cites Nowacek’s Agents of Integration and
later recognizes transfer as a central concern within scholarship
about religiously committed students (xiii-xiv). As best I can tell,
though, RRCT
marks the first time that transfer has been directly connected to the
discussion about religion and religious students in composition
scholarship. And to important effect: the concept of renovation
offers an important advance on what many scholars perceive to be an
oversimplistic metaphor of transfer. Vander Lei and her editors may
not have set out to reconceptualize transfer, but by considering the
permeability of boundaries concerning religious rhetorics and
discourses of gender, the academy, and civic life, among others, we
see in stark relief the extent to which discourses get remade,
reinvented, recontextualized, and hybridized as they circulate.

While
the volume as a whole tends to stress the possibilities of renovating
rhetoric in Christian tradition, the final chapter reminds us that
rhetoric and Christianity aren’t always the happiest of
bedfellows—that transfer from one to the other can have negative
consequences. Thomas Amorose shows how resistance to rhetoric in
Christian tradition has its roots in anthropological, hermeneutical,
and epistemological sources. Deeply ingrained attitudes in Christian
tradition regarding human agency, textual (biblical) interpretation,
and the nature of worldviews can undercut rhetorical flexibility.
Amorose is right: certain strains of Christian thinking do more to
hinder rhetoric’s renovation than foster it, a tension that
arguably rests at the center of the discussion about religion and
religiously committed students in composition studies, and his
reminder is an important one for readers of RRCT to remember. Amorose
notes—positively—that “the sometimes heroic efforts of
rhetorical outsiders like those in this volume” can help to
renovate rhetoric in Christian tradition, which he contrasts with
insiders to Christian tradition who espouse worldviews that delimit
rhetorical possibilities (138).

The
volume as a whole, though, emphasizes the fact that it’s hard to
categorize the rhetors it discusses as insiders or outsiders.
Hertzberg shows that Paul is an insider to both Jewish argumentation
and the early Christian tradition. The Mormon women Gere describes
draw on rhetorical resources to locate themselves simultaneously in
their faith tradition and in wider American culture. Tolar Burton
demonstrates that Mary Bosanquet’s attempt to exhort rather than
preach reflects her status as both a rhetorical insider and outsider
to Methodism. Much the same can be said about how the Hart sisters
and Eliza Snow in Adams-Roberts, Collings Eves, and Rohan’s chapter
enacted apostolic rhetoric, as well as about how the twentieth
century Protestant women missionaries Seat describes leveraged gender
ideals in order to subvert them. Rand’s discussion of the
resistance rhetoric of Seventh Day Adventism, much like her 2001 CCC
article on evangelicalism, underscores the rhetorical possibilities
of such stances, namely that they can help lay bare what John Schilb
calls “dynamics of power” (qtd. in Rand 27). And while Perkins’s
Tina did resist rhetoric in troubling ways as a result of her
fundamentalist perspective, Sara—the other student Perkins
discusses—is able to write as a rhetorically-minded evangelical
Christian. My point here is that RRCT
demonstrates overwhelmingly that drawing boundaries around “insider”
or “outsider” when it comes to Christian tradition is fraught at
best. And that’s a good thing.

In his epilogue to The Rhetoric of Religion—a
dialogue between The Lord and Satan—Burke records The Lord as
frequently reminding Satan, “It’s more complicated than that”
(282, 287). And that is ultimately the contribution I see RRCT
making to composition studies: we may tend to construct all-too-neat
boundaries between the rhetorical and Christian traditions, but it’s
always more complicated than that. RRCT
extends the conversation about religion and religiously committed
students in rhetoric and composition by simultaneously extending and
blurring its boundaries, by prompting us to rethink notions of
transfer through a more complex metaphor of renovation, and by
reminding us that the Christian and rhetorical traditions alike are
rife with ingenuity and creativity.

To which readers of RRCT should respond with a
hearty “Amen.”

Works Cited

Anderson, Chris. The Description of an Embarrassment: When Students Write about Religion.ADE Bulletin 94 (1989): 12-15. Print.